About this role
Engineers who care deeply about reliability, observability, developer experience, and reducing the time from code change to trustworthy signal will find a natural home here. OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer for DevOps within the Hardware organization, a team that develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions like Jalapeño to power the next generation of frontier models.
In this capacity, the engineer will define and build the CI/CD systems that qualify frontier models and the software stack running on custom AI accelerators. Responsibilities span model workloads, accelerator software, systems infrastructure, and developer productivity, requiring close collaboration with model, compiler, kernel, runtime, firmware, and hardware teams to establish scalable practices and shorten feedback loops.
What you will do
- Define the model CI strategy for frontier models running on OpenAI custom silicon and integrated accelerator systems.
- Build production CI/CD pipelines for functional regression, performance benchmarking, software stability, and release qualification.
- Design representative test matrices across models, configurations, hardware generations, software components, and deployment environments.
- Establish GitOps practices for reproducible configuration, promotion, rollback, auditability, and environment consistency.
- Shape monorepo architecture, dependency management, build and test boundaries, change validation, and developer workflows at scale.
- Partner with model, compiler, kernel, runtime, firmware, validation, and hardware teams to translate release risks into automated gates.
What you need
- Must have built or operated large-scale CI/CD, developer infrastructure, test automation, or production engineering systems.
- Must understand modern software delivery practices, including GitOps, release promotion, rollback, reproducibility, and policy-driven automation.
- Must have experience designing monorepos, build systems, dependency graphs, test selection, or change-impact analysis.
- Must be proficient in Python, Go, Rust, C++, or another language used to build reliable infrastructure and automation.
- Must have worked with distributed systems, schedulers, containers, clusters, or heterogeneous compute infrastructure.
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is this role located?
The position is based in San Francisco.
What is the compensation for this role?
The salary ranges from $318K to $485K and includes offers of equity.
What compliance or legal requirements apply to applicants?
To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.